Ciderboy
by Tinhen
Summary: [Improv 23 AUfuture fic] Jess Mariano, through the adoring and somewhat brainwashed filter of Dean. Implied slash, oh yes!. Dean POV.


Cider-boy

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Author/Email: Tinuviel Henneth / smolderingbunny@aol.com

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Improv 23: threw/through week/weak knew/new ate/eight

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Summary: AU/future fic - Jess Mariano, through the adoring-- and somewhat brainwashed-- filter of Dean. Implied slash. Dean POV.

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Author's Note: I originally wrote this for Improv 22, but was not able to complete it in time. It is the first time I've really written slash (though I dabbled in it in the Harry Potter fandom). I'm rather fond of Dean in this. Dedicated to Josh (gay friend), Andy (awesome older guy friend), and Ryan (slightly creepy best friend).

*

I'm a normal guy. I'm twenty-four and a half years old. I'm a college graduate. I'm from a stable family from Chicago. I have a little sister who adores me. I wait tables for money, which is then spent on either rent or alcohol. I'm searching for a real job, but so far no luck. That's okay, I guess. I know that I'm miserably boring. I didn't need Jess to point that out to me. 

Like I said, I'm a normal guy. I have an over-inflated sense of my own importance. I'm six-foot-plus and I have brown hair. I'm shallow. I think I'm unique, which I'm not, but what the hell? Everybody's like that. Thus, I'm a normal guy. He thinks I'm a headcase, which perhaps I am. But trust me, he's a much bigger lunatic than I will ever be. He tells me he doesn't understand me or my obsession with putting everything into tidy laminated boxes, but I know that isn't true. Jess understands my personality better than I do. I really want to hate him for it, but I can't because I have other things to loathe him for and it's not even worth the effort to add to the list.

He told me once that everybody thinks one thing about themselves, does another, and is viewed in a third way by others. At the time, I was half-drunk and still recovering from what can only be described as the best conversation that I've ever had. The air smelled like pumpkin pie. It was April. I'm beginning to wonder now about that nugget of wisdom he let slip (he does this occasionally, although most of what he says is just aimless blathering). 

So, in self-reflection: I think I'm special. I behave like your prototypical Joe Normal. Jess thinks that I'm a stupid asshole with too much ambition and a nervous gait. He's probably more accurate.

That's what I hate most about his sarcastic little ass. He's so cocky. He knows everything about everybody just with a look and it's infuriating. And creepy. Very creepy sometimes. And those assumptions he makes are usually correct. Which sucks. The first thing he ever said to me was: "Well." Just one syllable. Then he turned back to his drink and the leggy blonde he was blocking the hallway with. It was at some loud party and I needed to puke really badly. That one syllable was followed not too long after by, "You need to relax, Cider-boy." He laughed this horrible, dare I say whimsical laugh and pushed off the wall. He took me by the arm and led me farther down the hallway towards the restroom, which was my intended destination. 

When we got there, he rather violently threw the door open, tossed me inside, and laughed again. There was another man in there, standing at the urinals at the time of our entrance, but I don't remember noticing what became of him. I suppose Jess got rid of him. Perhaps he snarled viciously at him. Perhaps he said something calmly. Perhaps he paid him. Nothing would really surprise me. I stumbled over to a toilet and as I expelled the contents of my stomach, he hopped up on the countertop, lit a cigarette, and sat back to watch me like it was the greatest performance ever. To rival Anthony Hopkins in The Bounty. Like Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector. Shades of Anthony Hopkins in The Mask of Zorro. He compares everything to Anthony Hopkins. I think it's a little unhealthy. Mind you, the fascination with which he watched me vomit was also disturbing. Once I was done heaving, I wiped my mouth and looked up at him. He grinned. "You're deranged," was the first thing I think I ever said to him. He laughed.

He called me Cider-boy, he later explained, because I looked so clean. Now, most people would assume he meant this in the ironic sense. That is not so. Merely, Jess is insane and that is typical Jess logic. It is not meant to be necessarily logical to other people. In the beginning it was not logical to me. I have since adapted, just as his pretty, recently-divorced roommate, Rory, has adapted. However, I must refute that claim, because at the time I did not look clean. I was sweaty and stinky from the party, and as I have previously highlighted, quite smashed.

I came to the city right after I graduated from Northwestern. I'm not sure why I came. I suppose I just wanted to get out of the other city I grew up in. So I moved east. I had been told there was plenty of work in advertising in New York. I have yet to find any. I've been here for a year and a half. 

Before I met him, I was so pitifully basic. Full of typical post-adolescent self-loathing, spouting random quotes from Nietzsche and Shakespeare and thinking it made me seem intelligent. Paul Rudd, circa _Clueless_, would have been proud. Sad, considering Paul Rudd, circa _the Object of My Affection_, would now be more proud of me. Jess opened up a new world. This is mostly because he is insane and I am not. I have come to believe that he looks at the world through a panel of polarized cellophane tape. Most of the outside world just sticks to the tape-- which faces sticky side away from Jess-- and never gets close enough to affect him. At the time, I was obsessed with this image of the perfect life and future I had carved so carefully. Two-point-five children. Pretty, soccer-mom-type wife. House in the 'burbs with a two-car garage to accommodate the family sport utility vehicle and my own Saturn or Nissan or Toyota. Work in a filing cabinet in the city, doing something boring that pays an obscene amount of money. But that dream lay at the end of a road paved with coal and lined with toil like demented trees. I didn't drink until I was twenty-one. I crossed streets the right way, in crosswalks, for God sakes. I was such a nauseatingly good guy. Jess must have hated me on sight.

That didn't stop him from taking me home that night and letting me sleep on his couch because I was too drunk to tell him where I lived. His roommate, as I mentioned before, must have already been used to Jess' complete inability to go out and not come home with some poor sap who had drunk themselves incoherent. As cynical as he is, Jess has a surprisingly huge humanitarian heart. He would never admit it, of course. She was the only one home when I woke up at eight o'clock with the worst headache of my life. She was sitting in the nearby recliner, reading a book. Her dark hair was in a ponytail that literally spouted from the top of her head. She saw me move and put her book down. Wordlessly, she leaned forward and plucked two things off the coffee table and thrust them at me. One hand held a tall glass of water. The other, two ovular orange pills and one small white one. Vitamin C and an extra-strength aspirin-- how sweet of them.

She addressed me as 'Cider-boy' and smiled supportively as I took her offering gratefully. When I'd drained the glass, I swung my legs around to place my feet on the floor. She started talking, rambling really. What I gathered was that her name was Rory, she was my age, and she was already getting her first divorce because her husband had turned out to be a different person than she had thought him to be. Evidently, they never are. She threw him out, not realizing until afterwards that their apartment was in his name. She left later that day with her daughter and ended up at Jess' place. That had been six months before I ever darkened their doorstep.

"Jess likes you," she told me with a smile. "Jess doesn't like anyone." She got up and left the room. A few moments later she poked her head around the corner. "I just thought you should know that. Enjoy your day, Cider-boy." Cider-boy. Clearly, I had somehow lost my right to a name. 

I then ate sausage and toast for breakfast beside a six-year-old girl named Leah. She also called me Cider-boy. Rory's daughter looks exactly like her. Within a week, I had moved in with them.

I have always put much stock and work into the future. I worked my ass off in college to graduate with honors. I was on the Dean's List every semester (there's my own touch of irony-- Dean Forester on the Dean's List. . . okay, much funnier in my head than on paper). I took all the advanced classes I could in high school and had basically no social life so that I could do all the extra work. Everything going for me; the quintessential All-American boy. If my hair was blonder I'd have be Hitler's poster child for Aryan breeding. Now, of course, I'd be painfully skinny with an upside-down pink triangle patch on my coat sleeve, but that's how it goes. 

Keeping in the WWII reference vein, I told Jess the other day he was starting to look like Mussolini. Rory commented that we'd both end up stung up on meat hooks should that be true. I'm beginning to feel sorry for her. She pretends to be so worldly and wise, which she is, but lately she has been living vicariously through Jess and me and frankly, it's getting pathetic. Don't get me wrong, I love the girl to death, but I think she needs to get other friends-- preferably heterosexual female ones. I don't think she even knows anyone who fits that bill who isn't a relative of one of the three of us.

Jess doesn't really understand my drive, just that I've got it and he hasn't. I don't think he could really recognize any sort of ambition in himself if it wore a seafoam green toga and sang "Grease Lightning" in front of him. Complete with dance and Saran wrap condom reference. I think that lust is the only sort of motivation that Jess can handle. And, obviously, because I happen to have more motivation than a Galapagos tortoise on heroin, I don't understand his deplorable work ethic. 

That's truly the basis of our entire relationship, the inability to understand the chemical processes in each others' brains. He knows me inside out and backwards. He can tell me what I'm thinking (very disconcerting, by the way). But at the same time, he doesn't get why I am the way I am. He understands that I am, he just doesn't get why. At the same time, he's just one big, baffling enigma to me. I know he's insane, but also very intelligent. He gave me a twenty minute dissertation a few days ago about asparagus and Brussels sprouts and how I liked them cooked. He didn't seem to notice me when I told him that they are two distinctly different vegetables with unique flavors. He's afraid of artichoke hearts, I might as well mention. He calls them sneaky and weak, hiding under all those other layers of delectable green veggie flesh.

She and Jess have a past, the details of which I'm not certain. I do know that Leah isn't just Rory's daughter, but also Jess's. Other than this, they have kept me blissfully oblivious. That is how they like to keep me.

"Cider-boy," Rory said once, "you're more normal than I am." I took it as a compliment at the time. Rory is the most normal person I've ever met. Mind you, in this instance, sanity and normalcy are separate entities. But you'll have that sometimes, and that's how it is with everyone. 

Now that I think about it, I am rather normal. After all, some people aren't meant to behave as Jess does, with the whole world at his feet and a bottle of Jack in the cupboard waiting for him when he deigns to come home. Other than the fact I live with the most peculiar family I've ever come across, I feel quite justified in saying that I am the most typical human being in the City. After all, I'm a twenty-four-year-old college graduate who can't find a job anywhere. But I suppose that's okay.

*

End

Tinuviel Henneth / late March, 2003


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